The association has been more beneficial to France than to
England, because the French, both before and after the Revolution,
really tried to learn something from English political experience,
whereas the English have never been able to discover anything in the
political experience of their neighbors, except an awful example of the
danger of democratic ideas and political and social rationalism.
The ideas of the French democracy were in the beginning revolutionary,
disorderly, and subversive of national consistency and good faith. No
doubt the French democracy had a much better excuse for identifying
democracy with a system of abstract rights and an indiscriminate
individualism than had the American democracy. The shadow of the Old
Regime hung over the country; and it seemed as if the newly won civil
and political rights could be secured only by erecting them into
absolute conditions of just political association and by surrounding
them with every possible guarantee. Moreover, the natural course of the
French democratic development was perverted by foreign interference and
a constant condition of warfare; and if the French nation had been
allowed to seek its own political salvation without interference, as was
this English nation, the French democracy might have been saved many an
error and excess.
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